I'm trying to deploy ScaleIO 1.32. I have 4 nodes, with each having 3 146 gig drives, booting for SD cards. If I was doing production I would do bigger, but I wanted to do see what ScaleIO can do. I was able to get 2 nodes to deploy correctly. However on the other 2, I see messages like

If you were running the deployment wizard and you encountered the error "Failed: Add SDS Device ScaledIO-XXX to Storage Pool StoragePool1(Unknown ScaleIO error)" 3 times for the two hosts, you may use putty to connect to the ScaleIO virutal Machine with Primary MDM role and after login, you may run the command manually to add the device

scli --add_sds_device (--sds_id <ID> |--sds_name <NAME>

|--sds_ip <IP>)--device_path <PATH>

[--device_name <NAME>] ((--storage_pool_name <NAME>)

|--storage_pool_id <ID>) [--test_time] [Test Options]

Example

scli --mdm_ip 192.168.1.200 --add_sds_device

-–sds_ip 192.168.1.6 --device_path /dev/sdb

--device_name sd02

once you have added the devices manually then you can continue with the deployment wizard.

I have no issues with any of that 4-server hardware/config for a test setup, except that the fault sets will unnecessarily complicate things with that few of nodes. Performance-wise, you're fine running only one 10gig data network as I doubt 4 disks will saturate it. I do recommend, though, getting used to configuring multiple NICs/subnets for data networks, as you'd want to do that in production. In this case, it just amounts to allowing ScaleIO to use (read: adding SDS IPs on, and SDC NIC/vSwitch/vmknics on,) the management subnet as well as the "data" one.

You could install ESX to one of the internal disks, and choose VMDK instead of RDM for disk device presentation to the SVM. I'd create as big of a vmdk as you can feasibly put on the ESX-installed disk, the fact that it's smaller than the other disks presented to ScaleIO is a non-issue. Doing this would let you provide the 30ish GB free space needed to comfortably store and deploy the SVM from template, while still contributing the spindle to the storage pool.

Deploy takes a while, especially with VMDK as you zero it out during deploy. 8 hours, though, without VMDK... I wouldn't expect that.